FSC certificates have been called a reliable measure for the protection of mammals in African forests

They were much more common in certified concessions because they were more difficult for poachers to reach.

Yury Erofeev
3 min readApr 18, 2024

If loggers take enough measures to reduce environmental damage to achieve FSC certification, this effectively helps maintain biodiversity and the abundance of mammals, especially large animals and endangered species. Scientists came to these conclusions after studying more than a million frames from camera traps in equatorial Africa. The results of their research were published in the journal Nature.

Joeri Zwerts et al. / Nature, 2024

Tropical forests are a critical biome for maintaining biodiversity and sequestering atmospheric carbon, with a quarter of them used for timber. This creates threats to living organisms living in the forest: in addition to the fact that deforestation causes a direct loss of their habitats, the creation of forest roads for the removal of wood contributes to poaching. One possible way to reduce anthropogenic stress associated with forest use is environmental certification. In forestry, the leader in such certification is the Forest Stewardship Council, which is known in the world as FSC.

--

--